Courtyard garden master plan
The clouds have parted; the plan is clear. (-ish.)
After a good long stretch of feeling like all my creative energy was lying dormant out there under a blanket of snow, spending time last week with Briar’s beautiful garden photos shook something loose and my courtyard garden plans have started to unfurl. The other night, I finally had the space, motivation and creative flow to sit down with a pencil in hand and get onto paper what’s been steeping in the back of my brain these past few weeks, and it just came gushing out.
I started with the overhead, above, and it’s funny how much it helped for me to simply rotate my crude little site map on that angle — so North is up — and align it with the path of the sun across the space. As previously noted, this courtyard will replace a desolate stretch of asphalt between the back of the house and front of the garage, roughly 19' square. It’s where we’ll have a dining/picnic table, of some variety, adjacent to the carporch. And apart from staking out that dining space, my top priorities here (and pretty much always) are sightlines and shade. Both of which mean my main concern at this stage is the big shrubs and small trees that will factor into this, which I’ll go into below.
But first, what might the layout above look like from ground level? Pretty thrilling, if I say so myself—
